Musk’s 100,000-satellite Starlink plan exposes the scale gap with ASTS’s 13 satellites while VSAT fixed broadband falls 27% year over year.
T-Mobile embedded Starlink into its consumer offer and posted 12.6% Q2 postpaid growth, while AT&T bet on ASTS as its satellite-to-cell answer.
SemiAnalysis projects SpaceX inference capacity could generate up to $48 billion annually, a figure that dwarfs AST’s reaffirmed 2026 revenue guidance of $150 to $200 million.
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Elon Musk used a recent SpaceX town hall, posted to the company’s X profile, to reset expectations for what Starlink is actually trying to become. His framing is transformational: “Almost 11,000 satellites in orbit. That’s almost twice as many satellites as everyone else combined. And with Starlink V3 and beyond, we’ll go to 100,000 satellites,” Musk said. He added that Starlink “might end up doing over 90% of all Internet traffic” and described the effort as rebuilding “the entire Internet in space.”
Amazon Leo The 100,000 Number in Context
The scale gap between Starlink and public satellite competitors is now enormous. AST SpaceMobile (NASDAQ:ASTS), the closest publicly traded direct-to-device rival, has 13 spacecraft in orbit and is targeting approximately 45 satellites by early 2027. CEO Abel Avellan told analysts on the Q2 call that AST’s approach is deliberately different: “We are building the direct-to-device (D2D) network of the future today in partnership with, not in competition with, mobile network operators.”
AST reported $31.52 million in Q2 revenue and a $125.9 million loss tied to the BB7 launch incident. Shares are up roughly 50% over the past year but only 2% YTD.
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Legacy operator Viasat (NASDAQ:VSAT) is being squeezed on the other end. CEO Mark Dankberg told investors “the combination of growth in the space market, and our business and technical progress is creating more opportunity for us than ever.” Yet fixed broadband services fell 27% year over year last quarter, even as the stock has run sharply year to date on defense backlog strength.
The Wireless Wedge
Musk’s Tesla earnings comments framing Starlink as a competitor to AT&T (NYSE:T) and Verizon (NYSE:VZ) land differently now. Both carriers are betting on AST SpaceMobile for their satellite-to-cell answer. AT&T CEO John Stankey argued “network performance and operating scale can’t be matched” with fiber locations at 38.6 million. Verizon CEO Dan Schulman is leaning on AI: “with the emergence of AI infrastructure revenue, we are fundamentally reshaping Verizon’s growth trajectory.” VZ stock is up 15.3% YTD while AT&T is down 2.4% over the same period.
